RESUMEN
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) consume significant amount of energy to sustain their operation. From this point, the current study aims to enhance the capacity of these facilities to meet their energy needs by integrating renewable energy sources. The study focused on the investigation of two primary solar energy systems in As Samra WWTP in Jordan. The first system combines parabolic trough collectors (PTCs) with thermal energy storage (TES). This system primarily serves to fulfill the thermal energy demands of the plant by reducing the demands from boiler units, which allows more biogas for electricity generation. The second system is a photovoltaic (PV) system with Lithium-Ion batteries, which directly produces electricity that will be used to cover part of the electrical energy demands of plant. To assess the optimal configuration, two distinct scenarios have been formulated and compared to the current case scenario (SC#1). The first scenario focuses on maximizing the net present value (NPV) and minimizing the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The second scenario is centred on minimizing the levelized cost of heat (LCOH). The findings indicate that both scenarios succeeded in reducing the reliance on the grid to a value that reach 1 %. Moreover, they both reduced biogas percentage in energy production from 88 % to approximately 65 % through the integration of the PV system. In terms of thermal demand, SC#2 reduced the reliance on biogas boiler units from 100 % to 25 %, while SC#3 achieved an even more impressive reduction to just 8 %. The best LCOE value was attained in SC#2, at 0.0895 USD/kWh, with an NPV of 10.54 million USD. Conversely, SC# 3 yielded an LCOH value of 0.0432 USD/kWhth compared to 0.0534 USD/kWhth USD for SC#2. Despite their relatively high capital and operating costs, SC#2 and SC#3 managed to substantially decrease the annual electricity expenditure from approximately 2 million USD to 86,000 USD and 0 USD, respectively.
RESUMEN
Landfills have high potency as renewable energy sources by producing biogas from organic waste degradation. Landfills biogas (LFG) can be used for power plant purposes instead of allowing it to flare to the atmosphere which contributes to the global warming. The aim of this work was to introduce and examine an optimization model for maximizing the power generation of Al Ghabawi landfill in Amman city, Jordan. The optimization process focused on studying the effect of several operating parameters within the landfill power plant. To achieve this goal, a combustion model had been built and validated against a set of historical real data obtained from the landfill operator. In addition to that, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model had been built to perform a multi-objective optimization to obtain the optimal power generation conditions for Al Ghabawi landfill. The combustion model along with the ANN model aim to estimate the best engine operating conditions based on the actual daily data of the landfill. The engine operating parameters includes the intake pressure and temperature, the ignition time and the equivalence ratio. The results of the study indicate that the current operating parameters can be optimized to maximize the gensets power generation. Based on the daily data of the produced LFG, the optimal operating conditions for the landfill are 2.32 bar for the intake pressure, 303 K for the intake temperature, 0.9-1.0 for the equiveillance ratio and for the ignition time it is 13 degrees before the top dead center (BTDC). These optimized operating parameters can maximize the landfill power generation by at least 1 MW for each genset.
